How Stream moved from Amsterdam to Boulder to build a SaaS company

by Anthony Sodd
September 15, 2015

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You probably don’t even notice, but these days feeds are everywhere. Chances are that the majority of your media is delivered to you via feed format. Think about it. All of your social media comes in a feed, so does most of your news (especially if you're reading it in an app). Even companies that don’t rely on feeds solely to deliver their content are starting to include them as a part of their services.

It turns out that designing and building all those feeds is big business. Often companies will spend months just developing their feed technology. Not only is that a huge waste of time, it’s also expensive and in the end the final products aren't all that great. It’d be like if every major car manufacturer had to recreate the wheel every time they remodeled a vehicle. That’s where Boulder-based Stream comes in — it's like the Goodyear of feeds.

Stream has a solution for companies that want to utilize feed technology but don’t want to develop their own feeds. Basically, you sign up for Stream’s service and they’ll quickly and easily build you a feed that you can drop into your website or app. It'll use machine learning to ensure the most relevant content is listed first, and you'll get in-depth stats about what your users are interested in. The first 3 million feed updates are free, then you start to pay a monthly fee after that. It’s high end, plug-and-play feed technology with a subscription model.

While Stream is now based in Boulder, it has its roots across the Atlantic.

“I ran a pretty big startup in Amsterdam,” Stream CEO and Founder Thierry Schellenback said. “But one of the things I always ran into was that it’s pretty difficult to run a startup and compete in an international market against U.S. competition. The fundraising environment is way better here.”

Stream applied to go through Techstar’s 2015 New York class from The Netherlands and was quickly accepted. Since completion they've seen their technology adopted by about 150 companies and they recently finished a seed round worth $1.75 million. While they maintain a presence in Amsterdam, they have no intention of leaving Boulder anytime soon. 

“It’s great here,” Schellenback said. “There’s hiking, the outdoors and, of course, lots of sunshine.”

 

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